Reading at Open Space Gallery, Victoria.
Photo credit: Miles Giesbrecht. Artists’ works: Tommy Ting (London), Dong-Kyoon Nam (Winnipeg).
Mist on the water. Strait of Juan de Fuca near Sooke.
DG on Sombrio Beach.
Port Renfrew otters (just before we saw the bear).
First Nations exhibit, Royal BC Museum.
Douglas Street.
The bookstore founded by Alice Munro and her first husband.
Breakwater (dark by the time dg got to the end).
(Click on the image to read reviews.)
“This was, hands down, the best book I read in 2013.” National Post
“…stories as radiant and stirring as anything available in contemporary literature.” Los Angeles Review of Books
“…demands comparison to McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, William Faulkner.” Music and Literature
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John Berger
Here’s a review I wrote of John Berger’s early novel Corker’s Freedom 20 years ago, rescued from an old disk. The novel was first published in the UK in 1964 and was finally published in the U.S. in 1993 by Pantheon Books. This review appeared in the Washington Post in February 1994. Berger, as you all know, went on to win the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel G. and became a famous BBC TV art critic. An amazing, knowing writer. Get the book.
dg
The Verso edition.
Corker’s Freedom
A Novel
By John Berger
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Dostoevsky once said we all came out from under Gogol’s overcoat by which he meant that the roots of modern storytelling all trace back to Nikolai Gogol’s tale of a humble clerk whose great adventure was buying a brand new overcoat which someone immediately steals.
John Berger’s novel Corker’s Freedom is contemporary masterwork in precisely this Gogolian mode — the old-style noble hero is dead, and in his place we have the drama of a little man who throws all his passion and yearning into some minor, shopworn achievement and inevitably fails.
First published in England in 1964, Corker’s Freedom took almost thirty years to cross the Atlantic Ocean, a slow passage by anyone’s reckoning. I won’t say it was worth the wait because a delay like that is unconscionable, though not inexplicable.
Berger went on to win the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel G., but he also has an immense reputation as a (Marxist) art critic and avant garde film maker, a reputation sure not to make the hearts of commercial publishers flutter with anticipation.
Corker’s Freedom is about the 64-year-old owner of a grubby little London employment agency who one day decides to leave the home he shares with his invalid sister Irene and set up house in the empty flat above his office. William Corker is humble clay. He and Irene are emotionally pinched — what everyone today would instantly recognize as co-dependent. The single relationship that Corker can recall in anything resembling warm tones is his brief childhood acquaintance with a Viennese nanny.
The move from Irene’s house to the agency flat is the great adventure of Corker’s life, his last, desperate bid for freedom before the long night falls. In the midst of rearranging his mother’s old furniture to make a bedroom, he pictures himself as Lancelot holding the Grail. He thinks he has struck a blow for “The right of a man to be himself, the right of a man to find a way out of his suffering, the right of a man to live where and as he wishes — eager, curious, hopeful, experimental — the right of a man to say: I wish to begin again.”
These are brave, rousing words uttered in the cause of personal transformation in a godless modern world. But they come to nothing. In a horrifyingly comic climactic scene, a drunken Corker discourses on the meaning of life, liberty and art in the midst of an ill-attended church hall slide presentation on his recent holiday in Vienna. His sister sits in the audience tapping her canes irritably. His agency assistant Alec fondles his girlfriend. And a pretty young woman with whom Corker thinks he has fallen in love watches cagily while her burgler lover breaks into the employment agency and makes off with the company safe. Ruined, Corker ends up making crank speeches from a Hyde Park soap box and conning tourists for his lunch.
Berger pushes against the constraints of the novel form, using passages of screen-play dialogue and parenthetical stage directions as fictional shorthand to stand for everyday narrative machinery (set-up and background) that might take pages and pages in a normal novel. This is so that he can pay attention to what he wants to pay attention to, which is the gap between the inner thoughts and public statements of his characters, the tragic and ironic distance between what they know or feel and what they can say.
The drama of the book, in Corker’s case, is the gradual narrowing of this gap — at the end of the church hall scene he is saying what he thinks and knows, which, as Berger sees it, is a kind of folly bordering on madness and leads directly to Corker’s downfall. (Hence the irony of the final pages with Corker endlessly exercising every Englishman’s right to free speech to a sparse gathering of unemployed hecklers and baffled tourists.)
Corker is already done for when he announces to his slide-show audience: “To the best of our ability we must choose happiness. That is my choice. I may be interrupted, prevented or defeated by circumstances but at least I know what I want and what I am doing. I am making myself happy.” The final sentence is, of course, untrue, which makes the speech achingly tragic and absurdly funny at the same time.
Berger writes with amazing aplomb, packing his pages with pyrotechnic ethical wisdom, trenchant social criticism (couched dramatically in the life stories of a succession of deftly sketched secondary characters), and sly comedy (Corker getting progressively drunker on Austrian kummel while reflecting on the glories of Vienna and his long-lost nanny).
Corker’s Freedom is an exhilarating achievement, wise, unsettling, and alive with a sense of humanity that is flawed, doomed, yet oddly indomitable.
—Douglas Glover (Originally appeared in the Washington Post, February 27, 1994)
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Bonnie Prince Charlie bidding farewell to Flora MacDonald on the Isle of Skye after the Battler of Culloden, from the London Illustrated News.
Okay, the referendum is today. A brief memoir: I have Scottish blood, McCall and McInnes. On the McCall side, there was a Scottish soldier who fought with Wolfe at Quebec and then came west along the Lake Erie shore during Pontiac’s Rebellion. He was demobilized in New Jersey, but left the United States after the Revolution and ended up in what became known as the Long Point Settlement in what is now southwestern Ontario. On the McInnes side, there was a fatherless boy, taken up by Sir Walter Scott, educated and sent on the Grand Tour, who then inherited slaves and a tapioca plantation in Curaçao. Later he became the youngest slave owner indemnified by the British government for giving up his slaves. He took the money, moved also to southwestern Ontario, and never worked again. The two families eventually intermarried and my great-great-grandfather Daniel McCall ran a store in St Williams, Ontario, on the Erie shore. At some point, someone in the family cut this illustration from the London Illustrated News, framed it, and hung it in the outhouse (posh outhouse). Later, my grandmother, who grew up with it, took the illustration to live with her. Now it lives with me, hangs above my desk. So now you know which way I’d vote. On the other hand, these things always have a way of disappointing romantics, so I can’t bear to watch the news today.
dg
Amy Spain was a 17-year-old slave who, mistakenly thinking that Union troops had liberated her, looted her master’s house, taking some household goods and clothing. Her master defended her in court, but she was hung anyway. This was in Darlington, South Carolina. Oddly serene drawing for such a horrific act, a little girl waiting for the drop. Only a couple of white guys in front seem excited.
dg
One of the martyrs of the cause which gave freedom to her race was that of a colored woman named Amy Spain, who was a resident of the town of Darlington, situated in a rich cotton-growing district of South Carolina. At the time a portion of the Union army occupied the town of Darlington she expressed her satisfaction by clasping her hands and exclaiming, “Bless the Lord the Yankees have come!” She could not restrain her emotions. The long night of darkness which had bound her in slavery was about to break away. It was impossible to repress the exuberance of her feelings; and although powerless to aid the advancing deliverers of her caste, or to injure her oppressors, the simple expression of satisfaction at the event sealed her doom. Amy Spain died in the cause of freedom.
Read the rest at RUINS: The Hanging of Amy Spain.
Let him who is without sin cast the first severed head.
dg
Christians tossing severed heads into Nicaea during the siege in 1097. BNF MS Fr 2630 f.22v via Wikimedia
“As many as descended remained there with their heads cut off at the hands of our men; moreover, our men hurled the heads of the killed far into the city, that they (the Turks) might be the more terrified thereat.”
August. C. Krey, The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants, (Princeton: 1921), 101-103 Via Internet History
Open Word: Readings and Ideas: Douglas Glover
Artist: Douglas Glover
Reading and interview with local writer: Wednesday, October 8, 2014, at 7:30 p.m.
Genre: Literary
Douglas Glover will read from his new book, Savage Love. He is the author of five story collections, four novels, and two books of essays. In 2007, he was given the Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award for an author in mid-career. His novel Elle won the 2003 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Glover teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He publishes and edits the online magazine Numéro Cinq.
Glover’s reading is sponsored by the University of Victoria’s Department of Writing Orion Series in the Fine Arts.
via Open Word: Readings and Ideas: Douglas Glover | Open Space.
Reading Peter Kolchin’s American Slavery 1619-1877 led me to this.
Slave Auction, United States. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the life and adventures of Henry Bibb, an American slave, written by himself (New York, 1849).
And this. Call-and-response.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOOWcnOrqaA[/youtube]
dg
Here’s a review I wrote nearly 20 years ago, published in the Chicago Tribune at the time. Efforts at Truth deserves to be remembered and reread, as does its author. God loves the outliers and eccentrics, his hopeful monsters, too.
dg
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Efforts at Truth: an autobiography
By Nicholas Mosley
Dalkey Archive Press 1995
Nicholas Mosley is a rare beast — a reactionary revolutionist, what they call in Canada a Red Tory. He is an English lord, son of an infamous fascist anti-semite, a one-time Church of England apologist, and a writer for decades of highly regarded experimental novels in which he explores the ideas of consciousness and responsibility as a way of critiquing what he sees as the victim ethic of liberal modernity.
At first glance, he looks post-modern or avant garde, but he is not. He is just the opposite — pre-modern, if you will, the voice of an older tradition. Mosley is the champion of an heroic Christianity which reflates the Kierkegaardian ideas of paradox and the romance of risk. Not for him the Christian Coalition brand of weak religiosity with its emphasis on being saved — God’s version of Social Security.
Mosley places humans in the center of a mystery, with a duty to spend their lives paying attention, learning, experimenting — their reward being not safety but the chance of discerning a pattern. “To discover what is hidden,” he writes, “you have to go on a journey; what uproar, indeed, before you arrive at what is there!”
The author of thirteen novels and numerous works of non-fiction, family memoirs and screenplays, Mosley is best known in this country for his novel HOPEFUL MONSTERS which won the 1990 Whitbread Award in Britain and capped a brilliant sequence of books collectively called CATASTROPHE PRACTICE begun in the 1970s.
In CATASTROPHE PRACTICE, the same six characters weave through a series of stories dealing with contemporary issues of love, marriage and the upheavals of history. The books are difficult and unfashionably didactic — demonstrations of the paradoxical questing Mosley posits at the center of existence. But they are also immensely interesting, dense with a sardonic self-honesty, humane and accepting.
Now Mosley has written EFFORTS AT TRUTH, a magnificently idiosyncratic autobiography, in which, with characteristic tenacity, intelligence and decency, he tries to picture the patterns that have informed his own life and work.
Sir Oswald Mosley, the author’s father, was the dashing, charismatic, philandering leader of the Black Shirts, British Fascist sympathizers during World War II. Faced with the paradox of loving his father and hating his ideas, Mosley quickly learned to walk a tightrope between admiration and criticism. While his father languished in a British prison, Nicholas Mosley was in the army fighting Hitler. And amidst the fighting, he found time to exchange loving, deeply intelligent letters with his father.
This ability to hold contradictions suspended in thought, to walk psychic tightropes (Keat’s called it Negative Capability), with minefields on either side, is one-half of the Nicholas Mosley equation.
The other half has to do with the Bible, the Church of England and old-fashioned goodness. Mosley’s dissatisfaction with the traditional novel form stems from a commitment to a literal Christianity, the kind that explores earnestly what is meant by goodness, God and grace in worldly and up-to-date terms. Mosley is no born-again tub-thumper — he is the sort of Christian writer who can write, in his inimitably droll fashion, “For the experience of making patterns the word ‘God’ is useful, but not imperative.”
According to Mosley, modern novels portray characters as victims, with no room for assigning or accepting responsibility for actions. “The literary world seemed to have been taken over by a vast army of contemporary fashion in which freedom was denied and ideas of dignity and redemption mocked.” He set out to write books which, in his words, related the inner (thought) to the outer (actions).
This was no easy task. A new form had to be invented. Mosley’s prose style has a functional awkwardness built in (Mosley himself has always stuttered — he speculates upon the relationship between trying to see the world clearly and his inability to speak). He mixes together letters from lovers, wives and friends, excerpts from his essays and biographies, and passages that are formal pastiches from his novels.
One of Mosley’s favorite devices is the rhetorical question, which gives the narrative a questing quality, an open-endedness. Frequently, his syntax stretches for a kind hypothetical uncertainty — “And at the center of the paradox, should it not indeed be something about sponteneity that is learned?” Sentences like this read strangely at first, till the reader begins to see them as tied perfectly to the author’s project: the careful dissection of thought and action in an effort to reveal some central pattern whose nature may be inexpressible in ordinary expository terms.
Mosley’s rhetoric, like that of Jacques Derrida or Ludwig Wittgenstein, has the quality of seeming to teeter at the very edge of language. Those questions, the sudden twists of self-doubt, the leaps of understanding, the conditional hypotheses — have the effect of drawing the reader’s attention to something that is not quite being said or understood.
EFFORTS AT TRUTH weaves back and forth between Mosley’s life and the life of his books, showing how the one influenced the other. The discovery that, in his earlier books, he has repeated the self-sacrificial hero motif, leads him to shake off a post-combat depression and locate an unexamined yen for the Church of England. (What, after all, is Jesus but a self-sacrificial hero?)
He befriends a monk, suspends his novel-writing and takes over an Anglican magazine called PRISM from which pulpit he blasts the church for moral complacency. This wild turn into Anglicanism happens just as the Angry Young Men, writers like John Osbourne and Kingsly Amis, are storming the bastions of English letters and is an example of Mosley’s sturdy inability to stay with the crowd. Modishness is a vice to which he seems singularly, and sometimes comically, immune.
Meanwhile, Mosley has married, had children, and become willful philandering skunk like his father. At one point, father and son meet accidentally while chasing women in the same London dive. But Mosley’s monk-friend takes him aside and gently suggests there is something wrong in his family dynamic, especially in regard to children.
Till then Mosely has taken forgranted the upper class English notion that children should be raised by someone else. Author and wife energetically fire their nanny and begin to teach themselves how to take care of children, how to love them. Later on, he even figures out about the philandering mess — but not before his willfulness has ruined his first marriage.
Mosley has a fling with screen-writing when two of his novels sell to the movies. He suffers a terrible car accident from which it takes him a year to recover. He goes into analysis and marries a fellow analysand, both of them embarking on this venture in the charmingly naive belief that they have achieved wisdom enough to assure a problem-free marriage. “Here were Verity and I intending to be model spouses and parents in some psychoanalytically re-cycled Garden of Eden. Oh dear!”
Mosley is unsparing of himself, exploring his own smokescreens and cruelties, detailing the awful consequences of his infidelities. One woman has a nervous breakdown, another an abortion. In a letter, his first wife writes: “We are beastly when we are together, but I like you when you’re away very much.” One gets the impression of a creative volcano, an immensely intelligent and self-willed personality, guaranteed to give a rough ride to whoever comes within reach.
EFFORTS AT TRUTH does not set out to be a popular autobiography. There is no name-dropping, little inter-twining of current events (surprising for an author who, in HOPEFUL LOSERS, wrote a masterful historical novel). Mosley sticks with his work and his family, knowing that within this narrow ambit most of the great mysteries of life are played out.
All this is told with infectious brio. Despite the in-built difficulty of the argument, EFFORTS AT TRUTH radiates a cheerfulness, a curiosity about life that is fundamentally healthy and humane. Mosely marks his sins but does not compound them by wallowing in guilt; he does not present himself as a victim of his own faults.
EFFORTS AT TRUTH is an antidote for those who feel the current debates between the right and the left, the Moral Majority and the advocates of a social safety net, have bogged down in stale rhetoric and endlessly circling arguments. It is a brilliant work of literary artistry and an act of faith — a message of mysterious complexity that goes straight to the heart of existence.
—Douglas Glover
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Extraordinary Carlos Schwabe illustrations for Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal.” See many more images posted at the sepia path. Read the poems in French and English translations here.
dg
J’aime le souvenir de ces époques nues
J’aime le souvenir de ces époques nues,
Dont Phoebus se plaisait à dorer les statues.
Alors l’homme et la femme en leur agilité
Jouissaient sans mensonge et sans anxiété,
Et, le ciel amoureux leur caressant l’échine,
Exerçaient la santé de leur noble machine.
Cybèle alors, fertile en produits généreux,
Ne trouvait point ses fils un poids trop onéreux,
Mais, louve au coeur gonflé de tendresses communes
Abreuvait l’univers à ses tétines brunes.
L’homme, élégant, robuste et fort, avait le droit
D’être fier des beautés qui le nommaient leur roi;
Fruits purs de tout outrage et vierges de gerçures,
Dont la chair lisse et ferme appelait les morsures!
Le Poète aujourd’hui, quand il veut concevoir
Ces natives grandeurs, aux lieux où se font voir
La nudité de l’homme et celle de la femme,
Sent un froid ténébreux envelopper son âme
Devant ce noir tableau plein d’épouvantement.
Ô monstruosités pleurant leur vêtement!
Ô ridicules troncs! torses dignes des masques!
Ô pauvres corps tordus, maigres, ventrus ou flasques,
Que le dieu de l’Utile, implacable et serein,
Enfants, emmaillota dans ses langes d’airain!
Et vous, femmes, hélas! pâles comme des cierges,
Que ronge et que nourrit la débauche, et vous, vierges,
Du vice maternel traînant l’hérédité
Et toutes les hideurs de la fécondité!
Nous avons, il est vrai, nations corrompues,
Aux peuples anciens des beautés inconnues:
Des visages rongés par les chancres du coeur,
Et comme qui dirait des beautés de langueur;
Mais ces inventions de nos muses tardives
N’empêcheront jamais les races maladives
De rendre à la jeunesse un hommage profond,
— À la sainte jeunesse, à l’air simple, au doux front,
À l’oeil limpide et clair ainsi qu’une eau courante,
Et qui va répandant sur tout, insouciante
Comme l’azur du ciel, les oiseaux et les fleurs,
Ses parfums, ses chansons et ses douces chaleurs!
— Charles Baudelaire
Not to be too confusing, but this is a review of Butterfly Stories, written eons ago in the time before time (1993 to be precise) for Boston Globe Books. It came up in conversation just now, and I looked to see if I still had a copy. It was on a disc of old files in my safety deposit box. Go figure. I liked what I wrote. So here you go.
dg
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Butterfly Stories
A Novel
By William T. Vollmann
Grove/Atlantic Press
200 pp.; $22
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William T. Vollmann is a certified literary phenomenon. In his early thirties, he already has seven books to his credit, including two installments of a multi-volume fictional history of the North American continent. His journalism appears in high profile glossies like Esquire magazine. The Review of Contemporary Fiction recently hailed him as a writer destined to “eventually achieve historical importance.” He even runs his own publishing house, specializing in limited art editions of his work selling for thousands of dollars.
Vollmann’s latest novel Butterfly Stories — not part of the projected continental magnum opus — harks back to the author’s earlier and continuing obsession with prostitution. In The Rainbow Stories (1989), for example, Vollmann wrote about hookers and hangers-on in San Francisco’s slums. The Review of Contemporary Fiction spread features photographs of the author with assorted prostitutes — in one the author has his hand up the skirt of a black prostitute identified as an AIDS victim. His self-published The Convict Bird sports a bookmark made with a lock of a prostitute’s hair.
This time Vollmann, or Vollmann’s fictional alter-ego — identified as “the journalist” — ranges through Thailand and Cambodia with a photographer accomplice, flitting like a butterfly from one prostitute to another, tubes of K-Y jelly in one hand and packages of (mostly unused) condoms in the other.
The journalist catches an amazing array of sexually transmitted diseases. He worries about Pol Pot and the terrible things some of his whore-lovers and their families have suffered. He falls in love with a Cambodian hooker named Vanna who vanishes. Then he returns to the United States so haunted by Vanna’s disappearance that he divorces his wife and devotes himself to tracking down the missing prostitute. He also discovers that he has won the STD lottery and is carrying the HIV virus.
Butterfly Stories is a startling amalgam of self-destructive behavior, seedy detail (so much as to raise the issue of puerility, though perhaps this is a reaction the author intends), arcane philosophizing, and over-ripe prose that works by virtue of its very strangeness. Butterfly Stories reads like a cross between Henry Miller, Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs and something written by a kid with a green mohawk, EAT MOMMY tattoos, and nails in his ears. Or it reads like one of those postmodern art installations — chaotic, temporary, challenging in its bad taste, and riddled with scattershot culture-bashing.
“The journalist never tried the photographer’s condoms,” writes Vollmann, “because he didn’t even use his own as much as (to be honest) he should have; but the photographer, who tried both, decided that the journalist had really made the right decision from a standpoint of friction and hence sensation; so that is the real moral of this story, and those who don’t want anything but morals need read no further.” [p.26]
This is interesting, this is new, this is weird. No doubt about it. This is the death of modernity with a vengeance. And what we are left with, Vollmann seems to say, is not Nietszche’s Superman or existentialism’s romantic loner but a kind of Judeo-Christian moral sludge. This moral sludge, with its self-absorbed pop spirituality, neo-racism, platitudinous liberalism, and open acceptance of violence as a form of human interaction, is the dominant philosophical system in America today.
The argument of Butterfly Stories is rigorously logical. Pol Pot persecutes prostitutes (Vanna wears the scars of her persecution on her back). America persecutes prostitutes. Therefore, America and Pol Pot are identically tyrannical, fascist, and genocidal. This simple syllogism turns all our cultural assumptions upside-down, and wanting to catch AIDS from a Thai prostitute named Oy or Toy becomes an acceptable ethical choice. The homely little HIV virus becomes the Holy Grail of an inverted universe of values. (It is important to note that these prostitutes are not real characters. Nor is this book titillating or even informative about prostitution. Prostitutes are simply Vollmann’s shorthand metaphor for the mudsill, bottom-level victims of society.)
In this new universe, words like “love” begin a strange migration. Thai chambermaids say, “I wuff you.” Having sex with a sick partner without a condom is love. A prostitute allowing a john to kiss her on the mouth is love. Trying to get an erection, despite debilitating illness and lack of interest, so you won’t hurt a prostitute’s feelings is love. Buying a prostitute drink after drink so you won’t have to sleep with her and be unfaithful to another is love. And, conversely (since, in the world of moral sludge, consistency is a fascist value), being unfaithful, sleeping with another prostitute, though regretting it, is love.
Butterfly Stories ends up being a parody of the traditional romance novel in which the knight errant-journalist falls chastely in love (love is just wanting to hold a prostitute without having sex) with an unreachable, ideal woman who becomes the goal of his adventures. Vanna disappears only to become Western man’s traditional absent love object (the fantasy wife as opposed to the real wife at home doing the laundry). The fact that she may just be hiding out from a tiresome john is heavily ironic, even comic.
The joke, finally, is on the journalist-hero who wanders through Butterfly Stories sick and sick at heart, toiling in the coils of romantic calf-love, and spreading disease in the name of sexual adventure. He doesn’t even have a name. He is Graham Greene’s ugly American and he is Everyman. He is the new hero, the epitome of moral sludge, a walking, talking, self-incriminating critique of the Western world.
Vollmann goes farther than any American writer in expressing his national self-disgust. He consigns his readers to a region of despair where even the hope of hope is lost, where even the consolation of some fragmentary beauty is denied. Butterfly Stories is one long, intricate and disturbing epitaph on a dying civilization.
—Douglas Glover
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An elf
People living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. And if you’re in Iceland, even displacing a stone could be sacrilegious. That’s because there could be elves under there.
Warped rock in the continental rift between the North American and Eurasian plates. There may be elves hidden in there.
Don’t ask why, but I”m on the loose in this lusciously green country of volcanos, glaciers, geysers, and $30 fish-and-chips. (Don’t even get me started on the price of beer.) I’ve found this country of 325,000 people to be an exotic, friendly (tourist-trappy, even) haven for lovers of isolation, the outdoors, and folklore.
As the ridiculously cool Settlement Exhibition explains, scientists are still uncertain when the island was first discovered, ever since a recent unearthing of pre-Viking ruins debunked the conventional story that Ingólfur Arnarson was the original settler, in 874.
And as detailed here last year, another ongoing mystery is the existence of “hidden people,” or elves. They live among the rocks in the lava fields that cover substantial parts of the island. Now, many Icelanders kind of mock this traditional superstition, but few have gone so far as to say they are certain elves don’t exist. On one tour I joined, the guide spoke of elves without a trace of irony. On the other hand, ethologist Árni Björnsson suggests only 10% of Icelanders actually believe in the little guys.
Many are agnostic on the issue. That’s partly why activists have successfully protested even large-scale construction projects in the name of the Huldufólk.
Female elf near tree hideout. I myself did not see this.
Whether elves themselves exist or not, there’s something uncanny and lovely about the idea of a “hidden” entity contributing to the mystique and beauty of this rather unique country. At the time of this writing, no elves were immediately available for comment. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
A geyser with water reaching 80-100 degrees Celsius. Probably no elves in there, but the steam felt quite lovely.
The heath and lake in the continental rift.
The gorgeous Gullfoss (gold fall), so powerful it sprayed much water up onto its visitors.
No elves out here in the ocean, where I caught a majestic rainbow rising above the mainland. I was riding to the Westman Islands, where I observed colonies of the beautiful puffin and where a 1963 volcano birthed one of the world’s youngest islands, Surtsey.
—Tom Faure (on Elf Assignment for NC)
Here are a few paragraphs from the opening of my essay on Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Cosmos. The essay was just published this morning at 3:AM Magazine. A great magazine, a pleasure to appear there.
Note my amazing coinage “onanomaniacal.” I was asked to explain what the word meant. I wrote:
Onanomaniacal is my coinage. It combines Onan (Genesis, Chapter 38) and “maniacal”. God smites Onan for “spilling his seed” on the ground. This is most often construed as masturbation (although some biblical critics are more precise and suggest it might just be coitus interruptus). In any case, Onan is the great masturbator of the Bible and hence Onanomaniacal means something like the adjective form of frenzied masturbator. So it’s a joke, of sorts. And there is quite a lot of talk of masturbation in Cosmos.
I used to drive by a warehouse in Guelph, Ontario, which bore the sign “Onan Generators” — this always seemed hilarious to me.
dg
In Cosmos — the title makes it obvious — Gombrowicz is satirizing the phenomenology of world creation, the mental process by which we construct a frame of meaning for ourselves. Not the world (whatever that is), my world. Both inside and outside the novel (that is, in so-called real life), the modus operandi of consciousness is comically super-rational and simultaneously self-defeating (Husserl demonstrated that reason was never going to get where it said it was going). You (a subject, a consciousness) begin to notice hints of repetition and pattern; you look for other instances of the pattern in the chaotic flux of sensation; and eventually you decide the pattern is real. This is the procedure of reason and science. But, of course, in Cosmos what seems real to the narrator is in fact utterly contingent and often ridiculous or even murderous.
Form cannot enclose reality, but form always threatens to become reality. That is the antinomy of the novel: you can’t fit the world into a book, and yet form (read: custom, tradition, ideology, inter-personal expectation, etc.) is always threatening to derail the life of the individual, that is, there is always someone or some thing trying to fit you into his book. Cosmos is, in part, a horror story in which the monstrous evil is a form (in this case, a literary device) that haunts the narrator and eventually takes over his life. Instead of Godzilla or the mad slasher moving ineluctably toward its victim, the villain of Cosmos is an image pattern.
There are two other forces working on the human mind besides reason. One is the dark and unknowable current of desire; the narrator, whose name is Witold, can’t sleep with the girl he’s attracted to so he suddenly and incomprehensibly kills her cat (it’s a sick joke, right? He orgasmically strangles her pussy). The other force is the desire or gaze of the other. As soon as you enter a relationship (however trivial), you begin to bend yourself to fulfill, oppose or circumvent the desire (expectation, form) of the other. Even if you resist, the purity of selfhood has been corrupted. So you construct another self in secret, the masturbatory self, the self who doesn’t have to relate or unmask himself before the eyes of the other (but who is corrupt, seedy, infantile, trivial and evasive in any case).
Out of this triangle of forces, Gombrowicz creates a truly awe-ful, hilarious novel. The narrator discovers patterns and deduces meaning; his own sexual violence betrays reason; he discovers that the secret life of the adult male patriarch is one of chronic secret masturbation (the creation of private, obsessive cosmos).
Read the rest at Consciousness & Masturbation: A Note on Witold Gombrowicz’s Onanomaniacal Novel Cosmos » 3:AM Magazine.
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David Wojahn
Our review of the Niedecker and Lax poetry collections, reviewed by David Wojahn, just got reviewed itself over at The Poetry Foundation blog. The reviewer even quotes dg (um, without attribution). This must be a first. NC is making waves. (Do I have to explain this? It’s a pun on Wave Books, the publisher of the collections under review. Oh, hell, read it all. Links below.)
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At Numéro Cinq, poet David Wojahn has penned an essay likening Wave Books to the salad days of Grove Press and New Directions, then steers his gratitude toward Lorine Niedecker and Robert Lax, whose Selected Poems 1962-1997 was edited by Lax’s former assistant, John Beer, and published last November. “Wojahn has read long and thought deeply; it’s terrifically bracing to absorb his fluency with poets and traditions, the ease with which he epitomizes lives, works and influences. Such brevity and compression only comes with the profound familiarity and respect. I don’t think it takes a poet to read a poet, but Wojahn makes a good case.”
The Guardian has unveiled its massive longlist for the annual “Not the Booker” prize, an alternative to one of the UK’s (or, perhaps, THE) biggest literary awards, and the titles are quite exciting: Louis Armand’s Cairo, which we published an excerpt from back in December, is included, as are books from Lee Rourke, Dave Eggers, Susan Barker, and the list just goes on and on and on. Here’s what The Guardian has to say about the longlist:
Those are the books you’ve selected for this year’s Not the Booker prize. I’m not even going to count them, there are so many. The thought makes my brain ache. And that’s just the way we like it: challenging, overwhelming, diverse, divisive, full of books of every imaginable type. Interesting, in short.
But wonderful as that list may be, we now have to cut it down. We have to choose the six books that will go though into the next round. And when I say “we”, I really mean you.
So chime in and cast your ballot! You have until August 3rd.
— Benjamin Woodard
I’m writing an essay about Camus’ novel L’Étranger, which has sent me off on delightful tangents. I was up till 5am this morning polishing off André Gide’s Strait is the Gate. I read it years ago, but sometimes you have to learn to be a better reader before the full charms of a text become available to you. Then I found this site, and was further cheered to discover how many of these books I had actually read, including the great Breton novel pictured above. I read that last autumn.
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France has consistently maintained its place as one of the most active hotbeds of literature. Like many other countries, its cultural sphere is devoted to understanding and challenging social mores, and novelists like Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, Camus and Sartre have blended their art with politics, philosophy, sociology. Here is a list of some of the most influential French novels from the past 350 years:
Read the rest via Le Mot Juste: 25 Classic French Novels | Qwiklit.
It’s a huge pleasure to announce that Genese Grill has joined the NC masthead as a Special Correspondent. She has already contributed mightily to the magazine, essays on Primitivism and Modernism (in the current issue), on Proust and Musil, and her impressive Apologia one why we write. Look forward to her brand new Robert Musil translations coming in September and a major essay on Musil and Ludwig Wittgenstein currently in the works for January.
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Genese Grill is an artist, writer, German scholar, and translator living in Burlington, Vermont. Her first book, The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s ‘The Man without Qualities’: Possibility as Reality (Camden House, 2012), explores the aesthetic-ethical imperative of word and world-making in Musil’s metaphoric theory and practice and celebrates the extra-temporal moment of Musil’s “Other Condition” as a transformative aesthetic and mystical experience informing a utopian conduct of life.
Numéro
Detail from Bad Medicine by Adriaen Brouwer (1606-1638), Musée Des Beaux-Arts, Dijon. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images via aeon.co
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Witches, doctors, Newton! Willow bark! Quinine! LSD! Snail water! Coffee!
Catching up on our reading, we wonder how many of the above we’ve ingested today, and note that the traditions of 17th century apothecaries, Enlightenment scientists, and psychedelic enthusiasts are not so different. Be it in 21st century laboratories or 18th century poets’ homes, Benjamin Breen reminds us that drug experimentation has always served both recreational, medicinal, and inspirational ends, at least since the Renaissance.
The fun of the piece is in the stories and ancient recipes, but the thesis is sound: “The clash between alternative and Western medicine might not be a clear-cut contest between ancient, ‘traditional’ remedies and modern, scientific ones.”
Read the entire romp @ Under the Influence: How did enlightenment thinkers distinguish between ‘drugs’ and ‘medicines’? And how should we? — aeon.co
—Tom Faure
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DG (right) and Lucy (left) on the farm (art shot — yes, I know it’s annoying).
DG and Lucy were just on the farm in Ontario, you know, for a brief visit, a drug intervention with his mother, a fight with a young gun investment advisor trying to get his hands on his mother’s cash, a movie with Jonah (we went to see the latest Planet of the Apes extravaganza; very funny since he is moving to San Francisco in the fall and dg would keep saying, See, there’s your BART station and there’s your apartment without a roof), flea bombing the tenant house, and dinner with a dear old friend who had a heart attack a month ago and was put in an induced coma and quick frozen, apparently, with no ill effects. (The part about the drug intervention is a joke. Do I have to tell you everything?)
Jean communing with her hens.
He found a treasure trove of old negatives and discovered that you can make pictures from old out-size negatives by using a laptop screen as a light box and taking a picture of the negative. Then he used photo software to invert the negative to a black and white photo. You should be impressed with his ingenuity.
So….
Jean somewhat earlier in life.
The nearest town is Waterford, where dg went to high school, about two miles from the farm.
Alice Street, Waterford, rush hour. DG’s bank since childhood on your immediate right.
Here’s one of the town appliance stores. What’s interesting is that this used to be a movie theater. You can tell by the shape of the building. DG saw his first ever movie here, a documentary about Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. The fact that this was the first movie he ever saw and that it is burned into his memory tells you a lot about what is wrong with him.
After it was a movie theater, it was a pool hall, den of sin (according to Jean). Nothing but failed individuals and juvenile delinquents frequented pool halls. Then it was a lunch restaurant where farmers used to convene to drink coffee and talk about bad weather. DG can remember going there with his father and having hot turkey sandwiches with french fries and chocolate milkshakes. No better food has been invented since (he avers, nostalgically).
The old movie theater.
Another major landmark, sign of long gone industrial prosperity, is the old knitting mill (underwear factory), now given over to antiques.
Alice Street runs east-west. The movie theater was at the east end and the knitting mill was at the west end hard by the train station. The train from New York to Detroit used to run through Waterford parallel to Alice Street behind the bank and the theater. Now the former rail line is a hiking trail, and next to it is a rather peaceful series of ponds and lakes.
About 100 yards from the knitting mill.
While dg was taking pictures he ran into a nice, depleted young man in a black leather pants, a Harley t-shirt and a black leather vest who opened up the conversation by saying he had a brain tumor but that his life had turned around recently when he began seeing UFOs. Apparently, crowds have gathered to watch the fiery lights go up and down the Grand River in Paris, Ontario, a nearby town. But even Waterford has had its visitations. (DG has always had a suspicion that he is not of this world. They are sending ships back for him.)
A recent local sighting.
New word learned on this trip: earthing. It means to walk barefoot.
Field of tomatoes on the farm.
One of the chickens, looking a bit like an alien.
Lucy.
Tomatoes.
DG with the chickens (photo by Jean; this is her first photo credit, a milestone at 93).
—dg
Tommy Ramone
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjfcggmk9MU#t=18[/youtube]
Bill Drummond. Photograph by David Rose
From British art provocateur Bill Drummond, we have the Ten (actually Eleven) Commandments of Art, forged during his “forty years in the wilderness,” as compared to Moses’ forty days and nights on Mt. Sinai. Drummond says, “Not that I can remember climbing a mountain and coming down with two tablets of stone. Mind you, I do recall a golden calf that had to be smashed, or slaughtered, or something. Or was it a dead sheep?”
Read Drummond’s Commandments, including “Don’t make punk rock,” “Let your lone ranger ride,” and “Burn the bridge” at The Guardian.
Along with writing and painting, Drummond founded a chart-topping band in the 1980s called the KLF, then publicly destroyed the band’s entire cash profit (one million pounds) in a bonfire. After declaring “recorded music has run its course,” he created a choir called The17, then deleted all its recordings. He is currently on a twelve-year world tour until 2025, or until “the Reaper sinks [his] raft.” Drummond will visit a different city each year, where he will display his “25 Paintings” and perform “direct actions,” like making beds (constructing them from wood), sweeping streets, and baking cakes.
The 25 Paintings—works on canvas, also advertisements for Drummond’s direct actions. Photograph by thecornpoppy.
A head painting, Black, White & Black. Photograph by The Guardian.
Before leaving Birmingham, England, where he has begun his tour, Drummond will chisel his Commandments into two tablets of stone. After watching the K Foundation burning one million pounds (that’s cash money), I think he might just as well take a sledgehammer to them and start over.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxC9wgm27j0[/youtube]
—Martha Petersen
It’s a pleasure to announce that Patrick O’Reilly, whose poems were featured in NC’s May issue, is joining the masthead as a Contributor. His first poetry review is coming out in the current issue.
Patrick O’Reilly was raised in Renews, Newfoundland and Labrador, the son of a mechanic and a shop’s clerk. He just graduated from St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, and will begin work on an MFA at the University of Saskatchewan this coming fall. Twice he has won the Robert Clayton Casto Prize for Poetry, the judges describing his poetry as “appealingly direct and unadorned.”
This is what comes of being on Twitter. Through Mark Thwaite and his wonderful literary website ReadySteadyBook, I’ve started tracking the very interesting American philosopher/metaphysician Graham Harman who does something called object-oriented philosophy. Object-oriented philosophy is just what it sounds like; it tries to deal with real objects instead of only paying attention to our human relationship with these objects, what we call phenomenology. Phenomenology became the standard philosophical gambit after Husserl, in the early 20th century, proved that the Kantian thing-in-itself (what we naively call the real) was completely beyond our abilities to discover, perceive and reveal. Philosophy then turned to descriptions of consciousness, how we seem to be aware of the world around us, whatever that it. People like Harman and others in the school of Speculative Realism are trying to revive the thing-in-itself (Kant’s term) as a going concern, something we really can discuss in reasonable terms. (Wittgenstein famously said there were things about which we just had to remain “silent.”) Here’s a lively and fascinating Graham Harman lecture, which I first saw on ReadySteadyBook. He is vastly more easily understood than a lot of philosophers these days — like me, he used to be a sports columnist, which helps in describing the philosophical play-by-play.
For a history of ideas backgrounder, read me essay “Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought” in The Brooklyn Rail.
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[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/85437398[/vimeo]
The Hanging
This has nothing to do with the mood I’m in, no. Well, you can decide for yourselves. I’ve been uploading images for the wonderful new Genese Grill essay (on Primitivism) in the July issue, and what with one thing and another (insane art, degenerate art, the news from Iraq, etc.), I was reminded of Jacques Callot’s etchings, his series on the Miseries of War (1633). Part of this comes from the fact that I am doing another interview (I am being interviewed), and, yet again, I have been asked to explain the violence in my stories and novels. The perennial question, right next to why there is so much sex in what I write. I don’t know! But I love these images. They delight me. Some deep, deep irony here about the human race, that noble, rational species created in God’s image. (Note the upside-down man cooking over the fire in the farmhouse scene, or the hanging corpse way at the top of a very tall tree in the peasant scene.) And I suppose it’s also true that there is hardly a work of art that depicts the gruesome quality of war with as much cynical detail. Makes you wonder why we keep doing this, what strange martial avidity compels us.
Click the images to make them bigger.
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The Stake
The Wheel
The Strappado
The Firing Squad
Plundering a Large Farmhouse
Plundering and Burning a Village
The Peasants Avenge Themselves
Jacques Callot Title Page (1633)
Normally, in this state of mind, I put up a little merengue. But tonight it’s Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, 1978, the year I was, er, researching events that went into my novel The South Will Rise at Noon, the good old days. We shall not see their like again.
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[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQswfILThsY[/youtube]
It’s a pleasure to announce that Bruce Stone has finally joined the Numéro Cinq masthead officially. I say “officially” because Bruce has long formed part of the shadow masthead, that cohort of friends/writers who contribute now and then without taking the pledge, signing the contract, diving into the deep end. Bruce has already contributed mightily to the magazine, essays on Viktor Shklovsky and Vladimir Nabokov (and yesterday’s piece on Joyce’s Dubliners), essays that speak to the magazine’s core aesthetic. Click on his name to look at his NC Archive Page.
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Bruce Stone is a Wisconsin native and graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA, 2002). In 2004, he edited a great little book of essays on Douglas Glover’s fiction, The Art of Desire (Oberon Press). His own essays have appeared in Miranda, Nabokov Studies, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, F. Scott Fitzgerald Review and Salon. His fiction has appeared most recently in Straylight and Numéro Cinq. He’s currently teaching writing at UCLA.
Francis Carco via Wikipedia
I’ve been tracking Francis Carco on and off since I read his novel Perversity, translated into English by Jean Rhys (yes, yes, really), but published in America as a mass market pulp novel, a very dark story of the Paris demimonde, violent, sordid, and sexual, a story of doomed people, doomed by desire, by social and economic situation, by the bizarre power dynamics of their relationships. Very real, very naturalistic and intense, tight psychological focus. Did I mentioned doom? Other Carco novels include titles such as Depravity and Frenzy.
Carco (a pseudonym) was an amazing character, brilliant, protean, creative and yet also sucked into that underground world of Paris. He was a painter, a brilliant writer, a lover and a composer and singer. But doomed and not well remembered.
Below, a song, his voice & words.
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Chanson tendre
Francis Carco
Mais rien n´était à sa place
Je suis resté, tête basse,
À me faire dans la glace
Face à face
La grimace
Enfin, j´ai poussé la porte
Que m´importe
N i ni
C´est fini!
Pourtant, quand descendit le soir
Je suis allé tout seul m´asseoir
Sur le banc de bois vermoulu
Où tu ne revins jamais plus
Tu me paraissais plus belle
Plus charmante, plus cruelle
Qu´aucune de toutes celles
Pour qui mon cœur a battu
Et je rentrai, l´âme lasse,
Chercher ton nom dans la glace
Juste à la place où s´efface
Quoi qu´on fasse
Toute trace
Mais avec un pauvre rire
J´ai cru lire :
Après tout,
On s´en fout!
It’s a relief (to me) and a pleasure to announce that Kathryn Para, Canadian novelist, filmmaker and playwright, has joined Numéro Cinq as Production Editor. I am optimistic that Kathryn’s presence will herald a new age of clarity and efficiency at NC and that she will find many ways to contribute to the magazine’s advancement.
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Kathryn Para is an award-winning, multi-genre writer with a MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published in Grain, Room of One’s Own, Geist, Sunstream, and Vancouver Review. She is the 2013 Winner of Mother Tongue Publishing’s Search for the Great BC Novel Contest with, Lucky, her first novel, which was also shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 2014. Her stage play, Honey, debuted in 2004. She has also written, directed and produced short films.
Peripatetic dg has been to the farm in Ontario again, with his dog and ancient mother.
This is an addendum to the post I did a few weeks back — “A Short Course On The Theory Of Continuous Recolonization Of Indigenous People” — showing a comprehensive series of lectures on indigenous people and colonialism by Taiaiake Alfred. This is an update or a letter from the barricades or a reanimation of the struggle in the form of a talk delivered in April at a conference at l’Université du Québec in Montreal. You have to watch this man speak. He’s amiable, articulate, intelligent and indomitable. In a cynical age, he’s a moralist, a smart man with a conscience and a mission. Not to be ignored.
Click here to watch “The Failure of Reconciliation”
Here’s what I wrote last time:
Taiaiake Alfred is an old friend and a fierce and eloquent advocate for his people. Among other things, we agree on a fundamental premise: the colonization of North (and South) America and the displacement of indigenous people is not an event that took place in the distant past, not a fait accompli, but a complex ongoing economic, social, spiritual, and psychological act. Until this premise is accepted and understood, most attempts to resolve indigenous issues will come to nothing, will in fact be little more than an extension of the colonization process (think, for example: residential schools).
I’ve been mulling this over lately and it occurred to me that NC might be a good place to pull together a collection Taiaiake’s speeches and lectures, to give you the measure of the man and sense of his thought. He’s very smart, studied, thoughtful and ethically fierce. Like Edward Said in a different arena, he is attempting nothing less than a complete revolution in the way the white European west views indigenous people.
From here you should go to his books:
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